Five Easy Pieces
Liner notes for the Criterion Laserdisc
by Michael Dare

     In 1970, the '60s may have been over, but the youth of America was still riding the crest of the Woodstock Festival into the brand new decade. 1969 gave us Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, Charles Manson directing his followers to commit the Tate-LaBianca murders, Senator Edward Kennedy driving his car off a bridge, Lieutenant Calley committing the My Lai massacre, American troops illegally invading Cambodia, and American cinema celebrating the life of the hippie with Easy Rider. 1970 seemed an extension of the same year as the Chicago Seven were convicted of conspiracy to riot, National Guardsmen shot and killed four students at Kent State University, and American cinema celebrated the restlessness of the new middle class in Five Easy Pieces.
     Five Easy Pieces is an anti-movie that's directed with such assurance by Bob Rafelson, you don't even notice how little happens. As one of the first films of the seventies, it caught the soul of the decade, if not the tempo (Saturday Night Fever did that). It is the ultimate road movie, a relaxed masterpiece, a film of laid back innovation that hasn't aged one iota since its original release. There's no particular dramatic impetus, just a journey from nowhere to nowhere, featuring a new actor who grabbed the attention of the filmgoing public and who hasn't let go yet.
     Before Jack Nicholson turned into Mr. Over-the-Top in Batman, he was an actor of supreme subtlety and nuance. After several unremarkable appearances in cheesy Roger Corman films and a couple of existential westerns, Nicholson finally demanded some attention through a small role in Easy Rider, a part he only got after Rip Torn dropped out of the film. He played a straight-laced lawyer who gets turned on by two biker drug dealers played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. It earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor in 1969, which turned into a nomination for best actor the next year - for Five Easy Pieces. The film was also nominated for best picture, but it lost both Oscars to Patton and George C. Scott. In any case, Nicholson's position as a major force in American film was secure.
     In Five Easy Pieces, he plays Bobby Dupea, an oil rig worker in Los Angeles whose life is going nowhere. He lives in a world of lower-class everyday people, day laborers, waitresses, bowlers, poker players, etc. There's nothing extraordinary about these individuals; in fact they're so damned commonplace that it's extraordinary that anyone decided to make a movie about them. But somehow we're attracted to Dupea, which is no easy feat considering the lousy way he treats people, especially his girlfriend, played by Karen Black with her patented form of vacuousness.
     She'll do anything he tells her to do as long as he tells her that he loves her, which we know he will never do. But she still does whatever he tells her to do, which frustrates him even more. When she flat out asks him if he loves her, he says "What do you think?" Bobby is a very good liar.
     After his best friend is surprisingly taken away by the FBI, Bobby decides to drive to Seattle to visit his sick father. Not that he particularly cares; it's just something to do in this existential approach to the road picture. Dupea isn't running from anything or to anything, he's just running, and taking advantage of every situation he possibly can. Obviously he will never be satisfied. He's burdened with the overriding belief that there's got to be something better than this, and he confuses a quest for freedom with an inability to commit. "My character in Five Easy Pieces was written by a woman (Adrien Joyce) who knew me very well," Nicholson said years later. "I was playing it as an allegory of my own career."
     In 1970, people still picked up hitchhikers. And thank God, because when Nicholson and Black pick up Helena Kallianiotes and Tony Basil on the way to Seattle, the episode that follows is a model of hysterical improvisation, perfect editing, and impeccable comic timing. From the instant they enter the car, the film enters another dimension as Kallianiotes (who later opened Helenas, the hippest night club in Hollywood) delivers an endless diatribe against filth.
     Soon they enter a diner where Nicholson plays out one of the all time classic scenes in American cinema. Dupea finds himself beating his head up against the establishment, personified by a waitress who is just doing her job. It's impossible to imagine anyone not identifying with this ridiculously frustrating attempt to simply get some toast. Who hasn't been stymied by a bureaucrat? Who hasn't wanted to knock over all the dishes on the table? With that one sweep of his arm, Nicholson became everyone's favorite iconoclast.
     Considering the backgrounds of the filmmakers, Five Easy Pieces displays a surprisingly sophisticated view of simple country western mentality. Bob Rafelson was born in New York City, and he spent his teens doing an odd variety of jobs, from rodeo worker to playing drums and bass for a jazz combo. He eventually became a TV writer, adapting stage productions for The Play of the Week, which led to his creating The Monkees TV show along with Paul Mazursky. Though the show was denounced by critics as a piece of calculated nonsense, he redeemed himself after it was off the air by sending up the Monkees in a brilliantly satirical and anarchistic film called Head (1968), which he directed, co-wrote, and co-produced with Jack Nicholson.
     Who would have guessed that two years later, this creative team would have conceived such a thoroughly adult and refined film as Five Easy Pieces. Both critics and audiences agreed that it was something special. In Vogue, John Gruen described it as a "Quiet, thought provoking, thoroughly engrossing film that relies on mood, atmosphere, and detailed characters to make its point." Richard Schickel of Life Magazine said that the central character was "consummately played by Jack Nicholson, who must now be regarded as one of the few truly gifted movie actors we have." But, as usual, Pauline Kael put it best, and longest. "It's a striking movie," she said, "eloquent, important, written and improvised in a clear hearted American idiom that derives from no other civilization, and describing as if for the first time the nature of the familiar American man who feels he has to keep running because the only good is momentum."
     In the end, Dupea is still on a journey, an oil rig worker on his way to Alaska for no reason at all. It's an easy out, and it seems the perfect vague ending, but hindsight gives the scene a strange psychic twist. How could he, how could anyone have known, that the U.S. was about to embark on one of the largest oil construction projects ever attempted, the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, completed in 1977 Bobby has accidentally made the perfect move. He's on his way to a goldmine.
 
 

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